During the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace doubted whether natural selection could explain such a unique power. In our century, Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who has dominated linguistics for 60 years, has supported a hypothesis that language and thought arose suddenly within the past 100,000 years.

In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such “miraculist” explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated.

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When we have nothing much to do, our minds travel through past experiences, future plans and imaginary possibilities. The process of mind wandering, or daydreaming, is more remarkable than it seems. It shows our capacity to recall particular episodes from the past and project them freely into possible situations in the future, even though we are not using words, but thinking in images. More.

Sure. But when cats and pigs have nothing much to do, they are not thinking much either…

Sp here’s the problem: To the extent that the human being is thinking in a human way, he needs to think and comunicate thoughts. A language can be built up out of almost anything.* That part does not require much explanation.

It’s not the language as such that needs explaining. It’s the fact of having anything to say.

Reviewer Anderson admits:

At this point, I have doubts and must admit, as Corballis does on his final page, that he too might be writing a just-so story, despite the breadth of his evidence. Still, I much prefer a speculative account of how language might have evolved to an invocation of miracles. And, right or wrong, Corballis will make you see your own mind differently.

Actually, there is no more utility in a just-so story than in a miraculous account. But many people today feel a need to spend time, money and energy on just-so stories anyway.

Dogs warn other dogs (which includes humans) about a hazard because they can predict what’s going to happen.

“Predict” is a stretch. What they demonstrably have is an association with an act and a result which leads to an emotion and an action driven by the emotion. An induction, if you will. But how much do they “understand?” Impossible to tell. but it doesn’t seem very “deep.” Do they lay around imagining different future scenarios? Likewise impossible to know, but nothing they do would lead me to think so. Nothing a dog does that couldn’t conceivably be emulated by a computer, without the computer having any imaginative powers of the future, or deep understanding of relations.